Pandaemonium (7 page)

Rosemary makes her way forward a couple of rows, then leans over to talk to Deputy Dan.

‘Mr Guthrie, sir, would it be all right if I got out my guitar?’

Fuck no, thinks Kane, before turning to share an appalled look with Heather, who puts a fist in her mouth and bites her knuckles.

‘That’s an excellent idea, Rosemary,’ Guthrie replies. ‘Singing some hymns would be most appropriate,’ he adds, with a look to Blake for encouragement; or is it just to check the priest isn’t wincing too?

‘Whoa, whoa, whoa, steady the buffs,’ Kane says quietly to Heather. ‘Can we not have a vote on this?’

Guthrie gets to his feet, offering to help Rosemary take her guitar down from an overhead rack. Kane seizes this moment to send a what-the-fuck? look across to Blake, who holds up his palms in an apologetic gesture of helplessness.

‘Keep it light, though,’ Guthrie advises. ‘Something to raise our spirits.’

Rosemary unzips the PVC carry case and removes her six-string, placing one foot on an armrest and supporting the guitar on her raised knee. Then she starts to play, at which point there really is an outpouring of religious expression.

‘Oh, Glory be.’

‘For Christ’s sake.’

‘God almighty.’

‘Mother of God.’

‘Christ on crutches.’

‘Jesus fuck.’

Rosemary strums a few bars, then launches full-throated into a hymn.

‘Do you think if there was a God, he’d want to listen to that pish?’ Adnan asks.

‘Christ, why could it not have been
her
that Barker stabbed?’ Beansy moans.

‘Fuck it,’ says Radar, climbing over Adnan.

‘Where you going?’

‘I can take being without my Nintendo, but this violates my fuckin’ human rights.’

Radar starts moving down the bus, looking out the window rather than at Rosemary in order to allay suspicion. She wouldn’t notice anyway. She’s so into her hymn that she even has her eyes closed.

Adnan pictures him as only a faint outline: STEALTH MODE POWER-UP ENGAGED.

Radar whips the guitar from Rosemary’s hands and immediately turns around to block her, keeping his body between her and the instrument. With little room to manoeuvre, it’s like trying to keep a beachball off someone in a phone box, so he offers it towards the nearest person, which turns out to be Caitlin. She can see the resignation in his face the moment he makes the usual wrong assumption about her being with the God-squadders, by which time the guitar is in her grasp.

‘Thank you, Caitlin,’ says Rosemary, reaching out expectantly and also making the same wrong assumption.

Caitlin turns round and instead offers it to the first outstretched hand. It’s that Goth girl, Marianne, who Caitlin finds a bit scary, but she smiles conspiratorially as she takes possession of the guitar, and it feels like something is shared in a moment of mutual complicity.

Marianne, in turn, passes it on to Cameron. He steps into the aisle and stands up with it, striking a pose. Behind him, Adnan can see Rosemary still trying to wrestle her way past Radar, with Guthrie getting to his feet once more at their backs. He’s wondering if there’s any way of getting one of these windows open so that Cam can lob the thing right out. As it stands, it’s only a matter of time before it’s restored to Rosemary’s keeping, amid another loud reminder of how they’re all ‘a damp disgrace’.

Rosemary gets a foot around Radar’s shin and draws upon the good Lord’s strength to trip him to the ground, administering the sacrament of a sensible shoe up his arse as she stomps over his sprawled figure. Cameron gets an eyeful of this and suddenly decides the guitar is a hot potato. Fortunately for Cam, Deso must have remembered his asbestos gloves, because he gratefully takes hold of the neck and pulls the box across the seat back. Standing up with one foot on his seat and the fret-board gripped in his left hand, he lets rip with a finger-flashing classical intro of a virtuosity and accomplishment so unexpected that even Rosemary pauses in her tracks.

Deso clocks Adnan’s look of astonishment.

‘It’s what you play when you don’t have Nintendo,’ he says, then breaks into a strum, nodding to emphasise the beat until people realise this is a cue to clap. Beansy cottons on first, then Cam, then everybody joins in, which seems to further restrain Rosemary, who just waits with her arms folded to see and hear what will emerge.

‘I want my hole, I want my hole,’ Deso sings, and is immediately joined, with ecstatic enthusiasm, by everyone to the rear of the bus. Everyone except Rosemary, obviously.

He’s got Deso in his sights now, though. Adnan images it: danger level in the red, a proximity detector pulsing concentrically, ETA running down in milliseconds. It’s reading around 0.657 when Marky suddenly leaps up from his seat, having made a slightly disquieting discovery.

‘Fuck, my arm’s on fire.’

Fizzy has to duck as Marky starts flailing his burning sleeve in an attempt to beat out the flames.

‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph,’ Guthrie says with a gasp, spinning on his heel and grabbing hold of Marky in one unbroken motion. He takes him down like it’s a wrestling move, getting him on to the floor and smothering the flames by lying with his chest across Marky’s arm. There’s a huddle around them, everybody leaning in to see. A little smoke emerges from somewhere around Guthrie’s neck as he lifts himself up to check that the fire has died.

‘Are you all right?’ he asks Marky.

Marky just lies there looking a little stunned, and it’s anybody’s guess whether this is more down to the shock of the conflagration or the force and rapidity with which Guthrie resolved the situation.

‘Markus, are you all right?’

Marky nods, holding up his jacket sleeve. It’s all black and melty, the outer layer collapsed and shrivelled. He stares at it in an entranced daze, then his eyes widen as his features suddenly become sharply alert.

‘Fuck!’ he yells.

‘It’s okay, stay calm,’ Guthrie says. ‘Just take a moment.’

‘Naw, look, for fuck’s sake, the fire,’ Marky insists, a panic across his face as he extends his arm.

‘It’s okay, it’s out now,’ Guthrie tells him, taking hold of his wrist and restraining him from his attempts to get up. ‘We’ll get this off and make sure you’re not injured.’

‘I’m not talking about my arm. The fuckin’
bus
is on fire!’

At which point everyone looks along the line of where Marky’s outstretched arm was actually
pointing
, and sees that the curtains next to Fizzy are indeed now well ablaze.

‘Where’s the fire extinguisher?’ Guthrie shouts.

Father Blake has reached it even as Guthrie speaks. He wrenches the canister from its strapping on the wall and bounds down the aisle, already spraying water towards the curtains before he reaches the fire.

It’s the sudden leap into action from Blake that belatedly alerts the coach driver to precisely what is being wrought upon his vehicle. A glance in his aisle-view mirror presents a sight he cannot quite believe, which is why neither can he help but physically turn to confirm with the naked eye that, yes, the St Peter’s kids have indeed set his bus on fire.

His eyes are only off the road for a second, but it’s long enough for the vehicle to start drifting just as it is coming into a bend. He overcompensates on the wheel as he returns to facing the road, causing the bus to fishtail as the sideways momentum is instantly brought into conflict with the forward drive.

Back in the rear section, the lurch has a whiplash effect, pulling everyone first one way then the opposite. It tosses them all towards the right-hand side, a section of which is now wet and smouldering.

Marianne, having been leaning into the aisle, is sent sprawling back across her double seat, giving her an extreme close-up view out of the window. Due to the sudden uncontrolled change in direction, the coach’s forward momentum is pulling against the efforts of the engine and the traction of the tyres to drag it sideways towards the grey metal crash barrier. This previously substantial-looking steel restraint suddenly appears to consist of two flimsy-looking waist-high rails, about to face off against the mass and energy of a three-metre-high coach, and beyond this barrier she can see a five-hundred-foot, high-gradient slope down to the shores of a loch.

There’s a percussive hiss of brakes and a scream from the engine as the driver drops the gears and ups the revs. The side of the bus scrapes the barrier with a foil-meets-fillings shriek and a shower of sparks, then from close to the front on the other side there sounds the most hideously dull and solid bang, the sound of the bus colliding very hard with something that did not give.

The bus comes to a sudden halt a fraction of a second later, the resultant jolt banging a few heads on seat backs and thus partially obscuring the sound and vibration of a second exterior impact. Sounds like it came from above.

There’s a moment of complete silence, not even the sound of the engine, which has either stalled in the final stop or been killed by the driver. Nobody says a thing. It’s like they all need a second or two before they can re-engage with anything or anyone.

Then an adult voice asks if everyone is okay. It sounds to Deso like it’s somewhere in the distance; can’t tell if it’s Guthrie or Blake or even Kane. He hears a few responses, each gradually getting closer, like they’re being faded up as his surroundings come back into focus. He puts a hand to his forehead. It took a bang but it doesn’t feel sore. He looks up, sees everyone slowly reanimating: those sent sprawling picking themselves up, others just doing the same as him: a quick once-over to confirm nothing’s amiss.

Then Deso sees Radar, still prostrate in the aisle, covered in tiny pieces of glass. He’s lifting himself up from the floor, glass tinkling to the ground around him with every movement, and as he raises his head he becomes aware of blood running down his face. He puts a hand to it then looks dazed and uncompre hendingly at his darkly smeared fingers.

He pats his hair, dislodging further fragments of glass, and finds more blood pooled up there.

‘Jesus . . . Radar,’ Beansy says, frightened.

Radar kneels on the aisle floor and continues to pat his scalp. ‘Not mine,’ he says, with a very gentle shake of his head.

That’s when he glances up, as does Julie, who screams.

The overhead skylight panel has been shattered by the impact of a deer’s head, which is now jutting through the aperture, staring into the coach with its dead-black sewn-button eyes.

‘Euh, that’s bowfin’,’ suggests Cameron.

The deer’s head is lolling at an awkward angle, still connected by an evidently broken neck to the rest of the animal. Father Blake takes a step underneath it, helping Radar get to his feet. It’s still a hypnotic sight in its staggering incongruity, something of a bad Photoshop job about it. Deso is trying to imagine the caption when the head suddenly jerks and he just about shites himself, in common with probably everyone else. Another rivulet of blood is disgorged from somewhere down the beast’s throat and runs out of its mouth on to Father Blake’s head, after which the deer is still once again.

‘Just a death rattle,’ Blake says, a tremble of laughter in his voice indicating his fright and relief.

There’s silence again, another frozen moment in which, this time, it feels like everybody’s too scared to re-engage in case they precipitate some new shock. Then Beansy comes to the rescue.

‘Venison tonight, folks?’